You arrive without announcement, a drum roll on tin roofs, a throat-clearing in the gutters where silence pools thick. We mistake you for forgetting us— but you return, patient, insistent, your fingers drumming the glass like old letters. The earth exhales petrichor, that ancient perfume of something letting go, something finally breaking into its quietest form. We cannot hear our own thoughts and for this we are grateful. You drown the wanting, the reaching, the small ache of being awake in a body that refuses to be still. When you pass, we stand in the dripping aftermath, listening to gutters sing their excess, and understand at last: you were always the mercy. We are less alone when you fall. Sometimes, before the first drop, the ground already knows— that dry, dark opening, brief as held breath, the smell of earth remembering rain.